Flipper wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2023 2:31 pm
Already talk of Utah and Arizona heading to the Big 12...I would have guessed the Big12 would be the conference to fall apart...kinda looks like the Pac 12 is.
I really hate what's going on in college football....I think the sport was better served having conferences with smaller footprints and sensible regional rivalries
I honestly suppose it depends on where your allegiance lies and what you hope to get out of football fandom. With where things have headed I kinda like this consolidation.
Certainly the MAC was far better served in the late 90s/early 00s era. Scholarship limits pushed a lot of talent out of the big boys. A new wave of offensive innovators allowed the MAC (and others) to get a leg up on the old guard stuck doing things the old fashioned way. HS participation numbers were at their highest ever levels, making the talent pool deeper than at any point in history. The BCS, for all its faults, helped push a bit more cash to smaller conferences than they had ever seen before. No way in hell, for instance that a Josh Harris ends up at BGSU now. Roethlisberger likely not at Miami either.
That all ended when the BCS was blown up in favor of a pseudo playoff that pushed even more revenue to the haves. Television contracts, especially with leagues creating their own networks, created a have/have-not structure that all too similarly emulates the actual American economy. Then, of course, the transfer rules have been changed; changes I largely support by giving athletes the same rights as any other student. Still, these changes have only furthered the gulf between haves and have nots. To add a tidy little cherry on top of it there are about 150k less HS kids playing football today than there were in 2008; if we assume the top 3% of HS players will play D1 that's about 50 schools less scholarship athletes (with more schools actually playing).
All these things have combined to create a world where vast majority of college football games are unwatchable. Haves playing anybody outside the top 20 or so teams are just blow outs so often the games are boring (I honestly have zero clue how OSU/Bama/etc fans stomach 80% of their schedule). Then the bottom half of D1 (like the MAC) has some competitive games, but that's only because the quality of play is so bad neither team can get out of the others' way.
Like any MAC fan, I seriously miss the bygone era where we could go into any Big10 team and make them sweat. I agree that the health of the sport seemed better when there were tons of competitive games on any given Saturday. But with the direction the sport has headed and the greater disparity between the haves and have nots? At this point, I support anything that forces more haves to play other haves more frequently to actually produce watchable football. They want to become a minor league feeder system for the NFL? cool...then stop playing preseason games and let's see what happens when OSU's schedule has Oregon, USC, Michigan, and PSU on it. Let's see Bama have to play OU, Texas, LSU, every season.
We're getting pretty close to the vision I've had for awhile. The SEC & Big10 have poached all the best from other conferences...the next step is to start trimming their traditional fat. They'll make even more money when they stop giving Northwestern, Rutgers, and Vanderbilt their cut of it.
